A lexical theory of auxiliary selection in Italian

An alternative to former syntactic and semantic treatments of auxiliary selection, this paper accounts for the distribution of avere Ίο have' and essere Ίο be' in terms of lexical semantics and the notions of prototypicality and markedness of subject choice. Works on Italian auxiliary selection are reviewed and their shortcomings highlighted. Burzio's unaccusative analysis of the Italian auxiliary phenomenon is ad hoc with respect to the selection of essere with si-impersonal and fails to account for the occurrence of verbs such as correre Ίο run' with both essere and avere. Also earlier semantic descriptions of the phenomenon cannot account for the occurrence of essere with si-constructions, and do not provide' independent criteria to attribute semantic structures to verbs and semantic roles to arguments.